GREAT LAUGHS

In our continued effort to diversify our content, Terminal Laughter brings you a new weekly column, Great Laughs. Proceeding from the suggestion that nowadays it’s the stuff of pop culture (and the funny stuff especially) that binds us together, we’ll explore some piece of pop ephemera that packs repeat laughs. It could be a movie, a Simpsons episode, a comedy sketch, a stand-up bit, whatever. So remember: every Thursday (more-or-less), you’ll get a new Great Laughs column. And feel free to suggest your own, as the pickings will inevitably dwindle as weeks pass.

I think it was probably somewhere around the time I heard that he’d be strapping on the flaming chains to play skeletal vigilante Johnny Blaze in Ghost Rider that I really got into Nicolas Cage. Of course, as a younger man I’d always liked his films. Coming in just as Cage was making his uncomfortable action hero turn in the late 90s, I remember watching The Rock, Con Air and Face/Off with a zeal that had hitherto been reserved for Jurassic Park, Robocop and Terminator 2 (great films all, but crucially lacking the Cage factor). […]

While I’ll admit to having no small soft spot for doped-out slacker comedy, Mitch Hedberg’s brand of stoner jiving has always struck me as being as hilarious as it is charming. While his later albums, Mitch All Together (2003) and the posthumous Do You Believe in Gosh? (2008) present a Hedberg who is noticeably more confident, having grown into a something of a cult comedy icon, Strategic Grill Locations has Hedberg at his most bashful. And it’s this uneasiness that makes his first album so funny. […]

Now, because the world is the way it is, you can apparently miss the point entirely and adorn your cublice with tacky Office Space bobbleheads.

For the benefit of the uninitiated, Office Space is perhaps the most perceptive comedy since Slap Shot in terms of examining issues of collar-colour. Ron Livingston plays Peter Gibbons, a disaffected computer programmer who slaves away in a cubicle updating bank software for the Y2K switch. The company, Initech, is plagued by excessive management, with numerous supervisors casually popping by Peter’s desk to casually condescend him about one or another bureaucratic misstep (most famously his forgetting to attach new cover sheets to his TPS reports).[…]